


Twelve/Clara and trust as the defining feature of the Doctor/Companion relationship

by Metabird (wheatear)



Series: Character dynamics [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Doctor/Companion Relationship, Embedded Video, Essays, F/M, Meta, Nonfiction, Relationship Study, Season/Series 08, Season/Series 09, Shipping Manifesto, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23017429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/Metabird
Summary: I'm here for that emotionally powerful bond between the Doctor and their one main companion, and you will see no better example of this than Twelve and Clara. A meta analysis of the relationship between Doctor and companion.
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Character dynamics [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1654255
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Twelve/Clara and trust as the defining feature of the Doctor/Companion relationship

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote this last year I didn't actually intend for it to be a ship manifesto, more of an analysis of the Doctor/Companion relationship, but I guess my love for Twelve/Clara won out. 
> 
> NB. There are mentions of Thirteen's run but no major spoilers beyond season 9.

In this post I'm going to talk about why I love the relationship between the Doctor and main companion in _Doctor Who_. Let's start with this clip of Bill entering the TARDIS for the first time:  
  


  
  
There's one line that really got me:  
  
**"You're safe in here and you always will be."**  
  
Genuinely, the first time I watched it I got chills, it was that good. It was like the Doctor had articulated something I had always felt and appreciated about the show, which hadn't yet been stated out loud. You could laugh and say he's wrong because the TARDIS isn't always 100% safe, but that isn't the point. The point isn't just the physical reality of the TARDIS being a fortress, a place you can retreat to and escape from the monsters. It's that travelling in the TARDIS _with_ the Doctor is safe. The Doctor is alien and the TARDIS is alien, but they're both safe. They're never going to hurt the companion. They will always protect her.  
  
(Contrast the above with _The Waters of Mars_ which deliberately flips this on its head by having the young female character emerge from the TARDIS at the end feeling horrified and _scared_ of the TARDIS and the Doctor. In that moment the Doctor isn't safe. Very rarely does anyone who travels in the TARDIS react in this way.)  
  
**I think that foundation of implicit trust is what makes the central Doctor/companion relationship so powerfully appealing.** The secondary companions can be more sceptical, like Rory for example who criticises the Doctor's approach, because they're outsiders to some extent. They're not number one on the Doctor's protect list and the same level of trust isn't there. But for the main companions i.e. Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Clara, Bill, the strength of their bond can be defined by how completely they and the Doctor rely on each other and how willing they are to do anything for the other.  
  
You'll notice that I haven't mentioned Thirteen, and there's a reason for that. Thirteen's run _doesn't have_ the Doctor/companion dynamic I'm talking about here. Thirteen and her 'fam' isn't the same. Shifting from the singular intense platonic love between the Doctor and their one main companion to the Doctor and friends as a bunch of mates hanging out together didn't work for me. I really got invested in the former. I don't care as much about the latter, and to me it weakens the Doctor because it reduces the power differential between her and the others (friends are more equal; Doctor/companion is clearly an unbalanced relationship) and makes her bond with them less powerful because she cares about all of them but she isn't particularly close to any of them.  
  
I'm here for that emotionally powerful bond between the Doctor and their one main companion, and you will see no better example of this than Twelve and Clara who trust each other so completely that it's an essential part of their character arcs and is explicitly foregrounded from the very beginning:  
  


  
  
This is Clara's first episode with Twelve as the new Doctor. Twelve appears to abandon her in a room full of clockwork droids. Listen to what she says as she's being threatened by the droid: "If the Doctor is still the Doctor, **he will have my back.**" And she closes her eyes and holds out her hand behind her. Like, goddamn. How can you not ship them instantly.  
  
We get other moments in Season 8 where Clara's trust in the Doctor is called out, in particular by Danny e.g. in _The Caretaker_ where Danny notices how Clara follows Twelve's orders without question when dealing with a threat, and isn't too happy about it. But Clara's trust in the Doctor is justified. We know that because we see it.   
  


  
  
**"Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"**  
  
This might be the most romantic line I've ever read. I'm not even kidding. It says so much. Twelve's unwavering belief in Clara, his care for her, to the point that it doesn't matter what Clara does, he loves her unconditionally anyway.  
  
You'd think this would be the high point because how can you possibly top that, but then Season 9 comes along with _Heaven Sent_ and _Hell Bent_ and Twelve literally spends billions of years trapped in a confession dial (basically his own personal torture chamber) to save Clara's life:  
  


  
  
Why? **"I had a duty of care."**  
  
This ship. My god. The most intense codependent emotional mess of a ship. I love them so much.  
  
If you look at all six of the main companions and their relationship with the Doctor, none of them quite match the sublime heights of Twelve/Clara but we always see them trusting and believing in each other, relying on the other to solve problems and face the monsters, and displaying an extraordinary degree of faith not only in each other's ability but also in their commitment to saving the day. This is obvious whenever they get separated: unless it's specifically a scenario where one is trapped and needs rescuing, the Doctor will always assume that the companion will take charge and handle the situation wherever she is, and the companion will always assume that the Doctor will find a way to save the day and come back to her.  
  
Where there are different degrees and variations in these relationships is interesting because I think you can attribute it to two things. One: **the first companion of any incarnation of the Doctor is his number one.** She's more special than the rest. That's Rose, Amy and Clara respectively. The companions that follow are all rebound relationships. Martha is the obvious example, but the same is true of Donna and Bill, and Clara when she was with Eleven.  
  
(I can't tell you how opposite my reaction to Eleven/Clara and Twelve/Clara is. When we were first introduced to Clara with Eleven, she was my least favourite companion. As far as I could tell, she seemed more like a plot point than a person. The Doctor treated her like a mystery to be solved and she only got half a season with Eleven compared to all that time he'd spent with the Ponds so she really got overshadowed. Seeing her with Twelve was such a transformation, it was amazing, and I loved that we got to see her juggling her personal life with travelling in the TARDIS. It really grounded her.)  
  
It's like the writers put so much effort into making the companion special and beloved and they know the audience has that familiarity and affection for her too, so they pour all that energy into the first companion, and then when the second companion comes along, they end up as a _reaction_ to the first companion. That's why she's a rebound, not only in the Doctor's mind, but in the minds of the audience. The writers know that the audience will be comparing this new and unfamiliar character with the one they know and love, so... what do they do? Poor Martha suffers from this most because the show couldn't get over its attachment to Rose, who after all was the first and only companion ever in the minds of a significant chunk of the audience at the time, and Martha ends up spending the entirety of her season with Ten knowing that she isn't Rose and she can't measure up to Rose. Bringing in a new Doctor I guess... magically reboots them so we can get a new One True Companion. IDK, human psychology is weird.  
  
Later on the show tried to avoid the problems they had with Martha by deliberately shutting down any romance, so we got Donna who was very firmly not interested in Ten that way, thank you very much, and Bill who was very firmly gay, thank you very much. This results in a very different dynamic compared to the romantic intensity of Ten/Rose and Twelve/Clara.  
  
Incidentally, why is Ten/Rose and Twelve/Clara so intense compared to the others? This brings me on to number two in my list of things that account for the differences in the Doctor/companion relationships: **Rose and Clara are the only companions who travelled with more than one Doctor.** What this means is that in the very first episode they have with the new Doctor, i.e. Rose with Ten and Clara with Twelve, they already trust the Doctor 100% rather than meeting him for the first time, which means the show can really dial up the co-dependency, as illustrated earlier in _Deep Breath_. They've got a head start, basically. The Doctor goes all heart eyes for the first companion he meets so when she happens to be one he already knows you've got next-level emotional bonding. With Rose and Ten we get the star-crossed lovers and with Twelve and Clara we get... I don't even know how to describe it, but it's a powerful emotional bond.  
  
Which brings me to my final point and why I prefer Twelve/Clara over Ten/Rose, because I think Moffat learned something from Ten/Rose and that was to not make the companion fall overtly in love with the Doctor. The fact that Twelve and Clara's relationship is ambiguous is part of the beauty of it, but it also means that the love they undoubtedly bear for each other is complete as it is. Clara isn't asking for or wanting more from Twelve than he gives her, and vice versa; they're already giving everything they have. Whereas Rose being in love with Ten meant she wanted something from him that he couldn't give, and they were both painfully aware of that. It means there was something lacking in their relationship, a missing piece, and the only way Ten was able to solve that was by literally sending Rose away with a human substitute of himself.  
  
In conclusion: Twelve/Clara is my pure platonic ideal of everything I want a Doctor/companion relationship to be.


End file.
